The birthrate in the U.S. is the lowest it’s been in 30 years
vox.com
vox.com
Some good points were made however.
Social Security in its original Ponzi-Schemesque form will end up even worse for wear with declining birthrates. (Not saying Social Security is bad in concept, but it only works in times of sharp population growth, and even then, banking on the youth to carry you just because seems squicky to many ).
The observation of millenials being reluctant to have children is also spot on. Many that I have spoken to in the demographic are very much a "lost generation". They've seen parent's and elder's life savings disappear.
They have a harder and harder time adjusting to a world that seems specifically tuned to resist and feed off of them. See financial product/debt product proliferation.
It's harder to find opportunity when one has an additional complication of digital footprint to manage with a dearth of interest in anyone older than them willing or interested in making sure the past engraved on the net doesn't mark them for life.
The hamfisted "feminist" overtones aside, the article makes a chilling point. Long cycle economic predation and the social pressures to avoid debt first and foremost are an effective suicide switch at the population scale. An entire generation has been shaped by these pressures, and with no relief in sight, a drastic shift in values may be needed to avoid a grievous societal destabilization.
Interesting times indeed.
Here's my perspective. I'm thirty, I've been in a relationship since I was 17...the same relationship..we've talked about kids a lot...at this point...I really don't think even with both of us steadily working for several years now at decent jobs we can afford to raise a kid. We've agreed we don't feel like it's fair to raise a child without being able to provide a decent standard of life and our own standard of life ia not the best as it is, despite both of us working full time, with regular overtime, at skilled jobs.
As far as online presence goes...clearly as I'm shadowbanned on here I haven't quite grasped the...uh...I would say subtlties, I suppose, of having a reasonable online presence. I haven't gotten used to the idea of the internet being a place where one posts real personal information, despite having been on the internet since the early nineties....I still see it as a place where identities don't matter and people who post personal information online are fucking idiots.
In all honesty, i've never really participated much on online communities until recently but still go about it with that nineties mindset not really understanding people are fairly hypersensitive (a bunch of little bitches) to stuff online these days.. I keep a fairly strict separation between stuff I do on a computer online and everything else in my life. I realize it's a necessity to start mixing the two...but I find it hard to combine an online presence with my real life stuff.
It's one of these thing's i've beeen working on though because i've found that's what all my friends and people I know have done.
Social Security works with economic growth. It doesn't matter if you get 10 babies or 10 robots. Automation makes possible to keep proper living standards without exponential population growth.
Social Security, as other services like education, stops working because it is not shared.
Actually, with enough automation, it is easier to satisfy a smaller population.
There are 3.5 million professional truck drivers in the United States. Self-driving trucks mean that you need 3.5 million fewer babies to carry out that task. Just 3 million if you actually need 500,000 people to maintain the software.
So, I agree with you that in the past Social Security was depending on population growth. That has been changing fast for the past 50 years. There is no economical reason to not have Social Security in the future.
You could structure social security as a tax on capital, but that isn't how it currently works.
Yes. 100% true. I just mean that it can be changed. It is not an economic constraint, but it is the current situation.
This would be true except the SS tax ceiling is extremely low. SS does not scale on the rich past $128,400.
One man owning 10 robots will pay less SS than 10 workers.
This is the whole reason why the "crisis" of SS is vastly overstated and a political choice, given the obvious available solutions.
That can be changed. The difficulty is more related to corruption and lobbying than any economical constrain.
But, you are right. If nothing changes on how taxes are collected, or if it continues changing against social wellfare then it is a problem.
It's absolutely tied to population.
[0] https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/employed-persons
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-dreier/post_9910_b_7988...
While the economy has grown about ~400% dependency ratios have gone up about 11% I think. Social security's affordability has always been about political choice - e.g. tax cuts for the wealthy or money for pensioners.
The new generation grew with aids, feel less influenced by the authority selling the one family lifestyle and use more contraception.
Now wait for Vasalgel to take off. When males will have total control of their involvment in pregnancy, you will see the numbers go down even more. And probably some serious changes in the man/woman dynamics.
This is true, but are enough people feeling liberated enough to not have kids to have this be a significant part of the lowered birth rate?
http://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2018/05/23/birth-rate-drop
Stephanie Coontz, professor of history and family studies at The Evergreen State College:
"I think the most important and concerning thing about this is not the number of people who are voluntarily childless, but the tremendous gap between the number of children women said they wanted to have and the number that they will probably have. Early this year, the gap reached its highest level in 40 years. I think we need to think very seriously about what it is that pushes people into this kind of 'delaying.'"
You often need a man to make the baby.
Edit: I see we're talking past eachother. I was responding to your claim that "Also a lot of people don't want children." I'm pointing out that, while that's true, the real problem is people who report wanting children but not having any.
I wasn't responding to your comment about male birth control. Although if you want my opinion, I think it will be good for men to share the burden of family planning. But I doubt it will cause the birth rates to plummet much. Men want children too.
If you interrogate only women, it's completely off.
"In a nationally representative survey of single, childless people in 2011, more men than women said they wanted kids."
"A different poll from 2013 echoed those findings, with more than 80 percent of men saying they’d always wanted to be a father or at least thought they would be someday. Just 70 percent of women felt the same."
Granted, I don't have tons of studies, and some of this data is a few years old (but still after the 2008 recession,) but I think it's reasonable to conclude that the drop in birth rate can not be explained solely by a decline in the number of men or women who want kids. For sure, that is a big part of it. But the fact that couples who want kids are not having them, and that this gap grew after the recession, leads me to think there are structural issues with our economy at play.
The American situation is increasingly sharp on both ends - if you're making $40k as a household in rural America, you're financially screwed if anything bad happens to you - in ways that aren't even relevant in other countries (thank you no state healthcare / no maternity leave), but at the top end, you're also pushed out - because you've graduated with $40k + in loans, and can't buy a house for less than $500k+ (and what, $1m+ in the Bay Area).
Structurally things are very bad for millennials. But things will change - it's never as bad as the news makes it out to be. In the next ten years the voting power blocs will change, and politicians will be forced to change policy in our favour. I only hope we don't screw the coming generations like the boomers did for us with their lack of foresight.
Back in the day, house prices were 1 year's salary. Now it's more like 6-7 years of salary, with a high tax assessment and no job security or pensions too.
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We make just enough to have a really good life without kids or have a really stressful life with them. We don’t even have a house yet (and I mostly don’t want one, but that’s another conversation). I ran the numbers, and I didn’t like the outcome.
Everyone that I know that has kids is sleep deprived, unable to do much of anything outside of the house and are in a lot of debt. Some people think that kids make up for all of that. Not us.
Just had my first 9mo ago. I’m exhausted. I’m 44 years old (and not financially stable yet due to divorce). It’s hard work at this age. But is it worth it? Absolutely.
I had no affection for children at all before this. I don’t (even now) like other people’s kids that much. But today I came home from a long day of filing SR&ED paperwork (Canadian research tax benefit) and my daughter would just not go to sleep - awful night. But I’m happy. The wonderful things about having kids aren’t in the shitty crap you go through every day. They are in the look that child gives you when you get home. That lasts forever.
I'm totally with you on how awesome kids are. They are hard work, expensive, and ... totally worth it. Wouldn't give up my boy & girl for anything. Ambivalent about other people's kids, but I try to be polite.
If you don't think it is for you, don't let other people convince you otherwise.
You can choose to have a family when you want.
You don't need to share blood with your child in order for it to be a meaningful and fulfilling relationship.
I'm from a large extended family that has overwhelmingly chosen to not breed and adopt children into our lives, when we are READY and WANT THEM, instead.
I'm proud of the fact that I will never breed. I will probably raise a child at some point though. Genetics are over-rated.
Intelligence (all g-factors, not just IQ but reaction time, etc) are roughly 40-55% heritable, depending on which study you choose to run with. Similar numbers are found for behavior, political leanings, conscientiousness, etc.
The blank slate hypothesis has been widely discredited. After work, the best contribution the high-IQ, high-conscientiousness people on this site can make to society is propagation of their genetic material.
> You can choose to have a family when you want
Fertility specialists would tend to disagree with your total disregard of reality, here.
> You don't need to share blood with your child in order for it to be a meaningful and fulfilling relationship.
> I'm from a large extended family that has overwhelmingly chosen to not breed and adopt children into our lives, when we are READY and WANT THEM, instead.
>> Fertility specialists would tend to disagree with your total disregard of reality, here.
For someone with such a high inherited IQ you sure do have poor reading comprehension.
People are watching us constantly, everyone has more-or-less enough food, there's a ton of shiny stuff and panda tasks in the enclosure, there's nasty loud machines everywhere, and if you have some young they're like this tiny very-vulnerable creature who will be shortly moved to a different enclosure to be watched by different creatures.
May not be economic!!
Um, E. F. Schumacher had 8 kids. He was more concerned with how people interacted with each other and not overpopulation.
At the same time, prosperous cities are booming and rents are rising. It's polarizing.
There are enough people in the US now, enough children, that our education system could focus better on technological and scientific advances for those who show the aptitude (by increasing opportunity and decreasing inequal access to education and jobs).
We do not need more people on this planet. It will only increase the likelihood of a major catastrophe like famine -> war -> nuclear war, which will then put scientific research back decades if not centuries.
From which growth-based economies will those rewards be taken? If not that way, then how?
The whole point is that I am assuming there isn't enough incentive on a large scale to deal with environment problem BEFORE they occur. With global warming, once we go past the point of no return, it won't be a quick fix. We will throw the equilibrium out of whack. If we were to pragmatically balance things now/going back a few decades, we could avoid the big swing that will occur.
So basically, the population may fall from 8 billion to 3 billion because of famine/war, etc. Immensely painful things... Or we could just have pragmatic restraint through rewarding sustainability, and it would naturally level out to 5/6 billion or whatever that number is... but without the immense pain of billion fighting/dying.
I could not be more diametrically opposed to your position. It's clear to me we have far too many people as it is, and the only way out is through population decline. Anything else is ridiculous line noise to argue about. Once you solve the CO2 climate change problem you have about 10 other just-as-bad crises right behind it if population growth continues.
Sure, as you say there could be some more black swan events in science/technology that technically lets us expand in the short term much like modern agriculture has. I don't see that as a positive as it simply delays the inevitable and makes it even more impossible to recover from.
There is no choice but to grow. People like to travel, conduct scientific research, and face and conquer new technical challenges. You cannot do this without more people and the productivity they provide. Period.
In that context, I see especially no reason to have any biologically related offspring. It's not like there's a shortage of orphans, because adoption might just as well be another option to actualize this inherent need to "leave something lasting behind as to give purpose to our existence", by passing on values and life-lessons.
Too bad the barrier of entry to that is usually very high, I guess for good reasons.
So many people seem cynical about having kids or doing anything else involving sacrificing happiness for meaning. And yet people complain of indulgence and a lack of meaning? It confuses me. You can have difficult but meaningful if you want: start a company and a family. You can also have happy and (likely) less meaningful: go all in on hedonism.
People can't seem to cope with all the opportunity and optionality modern life presents. Makes people anxious it seems. So much self loathing (don't have kids for the environment?). If you don't want kids, don't have them. If you do, have them. They will not starve and you won't either.
Life will never be easy, to expect it to be is somewhere in between whining and delusion.
Also, if everybody has kids early, the population of the world is going to rise above the carrying capacity of the planet. Which will cause future famines, wars, etc.
Finally, maybe other people derive meaning from other things. What life experiences would you have had if you didn't have a kid at 24? From 24-35 you could've experienced a music scene more deeply, traveled the world and become fluent in languages, worked on a Phd in a field. But you chose a kid, which is great! But other people chose otherwise. I agree that having a kid is a MUST-DO in life. But maybe later is better.
Plenty of Americans live in poverty, and plenty of kids go hungry every day. "Have kids, things will magically turn out fine" is terrible advice. "Have kids and start a company, two of the most stressful things a person can do" is also terrible advice.
Congratulations on the birth of your son, and I wish you and your family all the best; I've got a two year old tot at home, and I love her and I'm glad I have her. But it's not for everyone, and not all times are equally good to start a family.
Ah, the ol' "kids give my life meaning, how can anyone live a life without meaning?" trope. Hey, more power to you, but spreading DNA around isn't the only road to a meaningful life. Your false choice of "have kids, or live a life of hedonism" strikes me as the argument of the religious zealot. Speaking of religion, Jesus Christ didn't have kids, and he seemed to do okay on the "meaningful" scale.
If you don't want kids, don't have them.
And if you do have them, try to avoid attempting to convince the rest of the world that yours is the only right, moral, and meaningful choice.
In terms of being a zealot in general, there are few things harder to counter-argue as adaptable than having children. Certainly it doesn't make sense for the majority of people to have kids in the context they are in, but it's very hard to against having kids period. It's an old thing because it is in many cases true in practice. So it's hard to counter-argue on the basis that we are monkeys on a rock who should know better, when we don't, and never will. Because eventually, everyone exists because someone had kids, and so on.
There is a significant relativity to meaning. It's not that having kids is a binary (meaning vs. no meaning). It's that for me, I feel, and others, it's that having kids is a step function in what meaning is. The first time you work and have that feeling of contributing, that's very meaningful. Having a kid is like that times 100. So kids are impactful on meaning in a relative, as opposed to binary sense. Very meaningful, relative to other meaningful things. And certainly relative to meaningless things.
So I think almost all of history too much emphasis has been placed on kid having. But among this community (Western Liberals?), kid having has a bad rep, for mostly bad reasons, that will almost definitely turn out be a failed social experiment (or else, this community as it exists will just stop existing and be replaced by children of those who chose to have them, in whatever form that takes, better or worse). The point isn't, everyone should have kids, at all. The point is, it's meaningful, and you don't need a house, two cars or two incomes to make it sustainable. That in fact, the struggle and financial impact may be worth it in the end.
I did no such thing, but I'll allow that perhaps English is a second language for you and analogies might not come across as well as I'd like.
If women had not entered the workforce in massive numbers things could have continued based on old trajectories. The male breadwinner/housewife lifestyle was a formula that made it ideal for raising children cheaply, even if it didn’t seem like the most equitable.
If I had a good job and settled with a wife straight out of college I’m sure I’d be a father to two children by now. My income could easily support a non-working spouse and some kids.
But many of the women around me were not the type to settle so early, so I chased the money and ever more ambitious women. And with no family to support, I had dangerous amounts of money to spend on ever increasing prices and property.
And if I should marry a woman with equal earning power as me, we will be able to spend even more on whatever inflated prices are set before us. If you’ve ever been in a gay household with two men earning typical male salaries and no children, one thing you notice is that they always have tons of purchasing power. What do you think that does to the economy when it scales out?
Except that Japan has kept traditional gender roles, where the woman leaves her job when marries, and they have one of the lower fertility rates in the world.
At the same time, Sweden with very strong gender equality has a higher fertility rate than other European countries. Even that it is still low compared with historical hights.
Most of the predictions about the welfare state are true, though. In that some of its effects mimic a ponzi scheme.
I'd urge everyone and anyone to look up an age pyramid for their country from 1950 and onwards. It's absolutely telling. Preferably an animation.
e.g. Japan here: https://www.populationpyramid.net/japan/1950/
You can click through every 5 years. It's like a snake with food passing through it's body, starting with a big blob of young people who gradually move into old age, without replacement. The proportion of young (suppose an arbitrary <40 or >=40) to old completely flips over. In Japan it was 75% in 1950, but just 44.5% in 2010. If you take 65+ as a threshold, it was just 5% in 1950, but 23% in 2010. That's 4x as many retirees to support on a dwindling young (mostly) working population. 5% 65+ and 95 <65 is a 1:19 retiree to young (often working) person. 23% vs 77% is less than 1:4.
And that matters a ton because there's a gigantic age asymmetry in terms of expenditure by age group in certain fields. Take healthcare expenses by age: https://jamanetwork.com/data/Journals/JAMA/935941/joi160128f...
You basically spend a ton at birth and as an old person. With low birth rates and massive improvements to healthcare increasing life expectancy, we're heading for a disaster. The tax base is rapidly depleting and the tax burden is rapidly increasing.
While Japan is a disaster right now, their situation (by my understanding) was made massively worse through bad economic choices when their economy first started slowing down.
Germany and South Korea are two examples of extremely robust economies that have had terrifically low birth rates for a long time now, Germany has had fairly high levels of immigration, but South Korea certainly hasn't.
There's also the fact that countries like the US and the UK don't have particularly bad population pyramids but are still strangling the youth to some extent, it's more a political problem than a fundamental outcome of low birthrates and welfare states.
Anyway, Japan and Korea really aren't comparable. Just look at their pyramids.
Starting with the 64+ population, grew in Japan from 5% to 26%. Further, it's not just children (<14) who're a lower share than before, but also the working population of 15-64 which is smaller than before (from 64% to 60%).
In short, old:working age went from 1:13 to 1:2 (rounded off).
https://countryeconomy.com/demography/population-structure/j...
South Korea is in a very different stage. Its 64+ population only went from 3% to 13%. Meanwhile its working population from 15-64 didn't drop like in Japan but went up from 53% to 73%. If anything, Korea is in an amazing position right now and has been for some time. It's only now levelling off and going the other direction.
https://countryeconomy.com/demography/population-structure/s...
In short, old:working age went from 1:18 to 1:6 (rounded off). For every old person in Japan, Korea has 3 times as many working age people. And that puts a lot of pressure on the tax base, even if the economy is doing well, a greater share of production is redistributed away from young and working people to old and not working people. In a country where one young person has to produce as much wealth for himself and one old person, as another country where two young people can share that burden, there's a difference in pressure and sustainability of the welfare state.
Fact of the matter is that Japan is running a deficit on its social security system. You either need to raise taxes or expect welfare state retrenchment (which has happened in most developed countries over the past 30-40 years in large parts anyway). You can only raise taxes so much (Laffer curve). It's typically deemed as inevitable that Japan's welfare state will retrench unless it accepts immigration or technology rapidly does away with humans. I don't see either of these happening in the next few decades, so young people pay to support a system today that they're likely not going to enjoy to the same degree in the future.
Once people can choose to not children, factors like the economy affect population growth.
I would speculate that the disincentive is larger for wealthier people. A lot of child-related expenses are for positional goods (house in a good school district, saving for college) where the price is basically "all your spare income". So if you're rich having kids means giving up awesome vacations and the option of retiring before 50; if you're poor those things were never on the table.
Yet it's low-income households who have the highest birth rates [0] afaik this isn't unique to the US, in Germany the situation looks similar.
It's extremely interesting how this relation between income&fertility doesn't just hold true on a country vs country scale, but also on a domestic level inside these countries, there must be something very fundamental at work here.
[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/241530/birth-rate-by-fam...